This was a small project to stand up a basic shopfront quickly, and with a customized checkout process built around a sales quotation business model. Green River Gate is a fabrication shop that makes cattle handling fences and gates to measure for farming.
Summary
Green River Gate operates on a sales quotation basis for each order, and so their online store needed a modified checkout.
All of Green River Gate’s products are made to order, and sized to the customers specifications. The products on the webstore are not actually for sale as is.
The website would be small and basic, but needed a strong design.
The Quotation Business Model
When shopping in a conventional webstore, a customer will identify the products they want, and then purchase those products near the end of the checkout process. The business would then jump into fulfillment mode, packing a product, and shipping it to the customer.
Green River Gate operates on a slightly different process where the customer requests a quote for the products they would like to have built. The webstore needed to reflect that, and so it’s checkout process needed to modified:
- Customer adds the products and their rough dimensions to the cart.
- At checkout, the customer provides their contact information, and requests a quote.
- The website sends an email to the Green River Gate sales team.
- A Green River Gate sales rep contacts the customer to get exact details of the products needed.
In this way, the website essentially serves as a very detailed lead generation tool for Green River Gate’s sales teams.
Tech Platform Choices
Implementing the quotation business model as a bespoke solution essentially meant crippling the normal functions of an ecommerce checkout. Given that the site was small, and mostly static it made sense to go with WordPress and WooCommerce. This would be the easiest combination to completely customize in the way we needed. Whereas WooCommerce can be clumsy to scale, the modular nature of it’s code, and lack of dependencies made it much easier to cut up than say Shopify.
Breaking the Checkout
To make a quotation checkout, we started with the native WooCommerce checkout, and disabled the payment gateway code modules, as well as any inventory controls, invoicing, and customer account functionality. The checkout completion now sends emails out to the customer, and the Green River Gate sales team.
Design Decisions
The site is intended to be to the point and functional. It’s client audience are educated, and mostly know what they need already. The site design needed to:
- Quickly get the customer to the products.
- Convey trust and assurance that Green River Gate knows their business.
Shop Layout
We put a product slider right under the homepage cover image, with it’s top showing above the fold. This gets the user straight into the functions of the site, and given that Green River Gate has so few products, most of the shop is showing on the homepage.
Brand Identity
Green River Gates’ strong and straightforward brand identity is on full display across the site.
- The diagonal line from the Green River Gate logo is used as a separator on several pages, providing subtle visual interest, and tying the page to the brand.
- Friendly images of everyday farm life are used throughout the site. They were chosen for their soft colour tones, and relaxed, familiar feel.
Until The Cows Come Home…
We made a simple site with some smarts behind it, and hopefully our efforts keep Green River Gate making strong fences for a long time to come. At least until… well, you know.
Be sure to have a look at Green River Gate – they’re good people!
